Although
audiences had already been introduced to modernist, experimental modes
of theater before Beckett's Waiting for Godot appeared in 1953,
this is the play that had the most profound and wide-ranging impact.
This is the play that started a trend which became known as "theater of
the absurd." Before this play, audiences could expect the "well-made"
play-life-like, psychologically realistic characters, witty dialogue,
and well-crafted, causal plots with neatly tied up beginnings, middles,
and ends. But the theater of the absurd subverts these expectations at
every turn. The characters are unfamiliar, weirdly motivated; their
dialogue is filled with non-sequitors and "blather," seeming nonsense.
The movement of the plot is arbitrary; there's no identifiable
beginning, middle, and end-no "Freytag's pyramid" to help us get a grip
on the plot.

Most
strikingly, Beckett, like other dramatists working in this mode, is not
trying to "tell a story." He's not offering any easily identifiable
solutions to carefully observed problems; there's little by way of
moralizing and no obvious "message." The circularity of Waiting for
Godot is highly unconventional. Even today, it's not what we expect
at all. But it's very common in the tradition of the theater of the
absurd.

Martin
Esslin writes very lucidly about how the theater of the absurd works
like poetry rather than narrative. Traditional narrative drama tells a
story, develops dynamically. The characters grow and change before our
eyes, and that is the point of the story-to reveal that growth, that
change. We reflect on why it happened, what it implies, how we relate
to it ourselves, what it means. But the theater of the absurd doesn't
aim for traditional narrative because it rejects such narratives as too
artificial, too contrived. The world isn't really as neat and tidy as
all that. Things happen by chance, at random. Chaos and irrationality
describe reality better than rationality and order. So the aim is not
to create artificially causal plots, but to reveal for audiences a
powerful image, which can be literal, metaphorical, analogical, or
allegorical-like poetry. The ambiguity of the poetic image, then,
replaces the dynamic development of traditional narrative in theater of
the absurd. The image Waiting for Godot evokes, then, is poetic
and lyrical in essence rather than narrative; like a lot of theater of
the absurd, it's both tragic and comic in nature. The play is therefore
referred to as a tragicomedy, or "black comedy." The tragedy is the
futility-Vladimir's desperation, his growing awareness of the absurdity
of his situation; Gogo's frustrated desire to leave. The comedy is
everything else.

In
Beckett's work, too, we are aware of how the imagery (everything from
plot to character to dialogue to set) is characteristically stripped to
bare essences. His plays take on an abstract quality which many compare
to a kind of abstract expressionism for the theater.

So we
come back around to the question: why are these artists so
unconventional? Why be abstract? Why not tell a story in the
traditional way? Martin Esslin takes up this question in Absurd Drama
(Penguin, 1965):

Why
should the emphasis in drama have shifted away from traditional forms
towards images which, complex and suggestive as they may be, must
necessarily lack the final clarity of definition, the neat resolutions
we have been used to expect? Clearly because the playwrights concerned
no longer believe in the possibility of such neatness of resolution.
They are indeed chiefly concerned with expressing a sense of wonder, of
incomprehension, and at times of despair, at the lack of cohesion and
meaning that they find in the world. If they could believe in clearly
defined motivations, acceptable solutions, settlements of conflict in
tidily tied up endings, these dramatists would certainly not eschew
them. But, quite obviously, they have no faith in the existence of so
rational and well ordered a universe. The "well-made play" can thus be
seen as conditioned by clear and comforting beliefs, a stable scale of
values, an ethical system in full working condition. The system of
values, the world-view behind the well-made play may be a religious one
or a political one; it may be an implicit belief in the goodness and
perfectibility of men (as in Shaw or Ibsen) or it may be a mere
unthinking acceptance of the moral and political status quo (as in most
drawing-room comedy). But whatever it is, the basis of the well-made
play is the implicit assumption that the world does make sense, that
reality is solid and secure, all outlines clear, all ends apparent. The
plays that we have classed under the label of the Theatre of the
Absurd, on the other hand, express a sense of shock at the absence, the
loss of any such clear and well-defined systems of beliefs or values.

Bottom
line: these artists have lost faith in a well ordered, rational
universe. The world is a place where things happen randomly, by chance.
You live or you die by chance. The conditions you endure, you endure by
chance. There is no well-crafted plan, no scheme of justice by which
the universe operates.

Recall
the Dante we found in Canto I of the Inferno. He was lost in just such
a dark wood of meaninglessness. Didi and Gogo are equally lost in a
dark wood, but Godot, unlike Virgil, never arrives.

NIHILISM
and EXISTENTIALISM

Nihilism
is a radical philosophy of meaninglessness. Wikipedia tells us that it
is a "belief in nothing." The world and all the humans in it exist
without meaning, purpose, truth, or value. Any system of belief, or
artistic expression, that denies or drains away meaning can be
described as "nihilistic." Nietzsche famously accused Christianity of
being a nihilistic religion because it drained meaning away from
earthly life and kept its followers focused on a hope-for afterlife.
His declaration that "God is dead" reverberated throughout the 20th
century.

It's not
too hard to understand why nihilistic philosophy, which eventually gave
way to a very un-nihilistic existentialism, threatened to overwhelm us
in the mid-20th century. The waning of religious faith which really
began in the Enlightenment and grew even stronger with the steady rise
in our faith in the sciences was helped along by the brilliance of
Nietzsche and the
horrors of the Holocaust. The devastation of WWI put a huge damper on
the liberal
ideals of secular social progress, and revolutionary movements like
communism lost a lot of steam in the wake of Stalin's totalitarianism.
Hitler had plunged Europe into barbarism and genocide, justifying mass
murder as the "civilized thing to do." Atomic bombs demonstrated how
fragile and insignificant human life could be. In the prosperous West,
a kind of spiritual emptiness descended. Under these conditions,
nihilistic philosophy and art flourished.

Existentialism
is a progressive step up from nihilism, because whereas the nihilist
asserts meaninglessness out there and leaves it at that (justifying any
behavior at all), the existentialist asserts meaninglessness (out
there) but goes on to assert that it's the responsibility of the
individual to create meaning (in here)-that to create meaning, as Dante
created The Divine Comedy to rescue his world from meaninglessness, is
our human purpose. Of course it's more complex than that, but that's a
bird's eye view of their relationship.

A
thoughtful question to ask of Waiting for Godot is whether it
expresses a nihilistic or existentialist perspective. And to kick that
into high gear, you could ask whether or not it is a postmodern play.

SET

What do
you expect from a set when you go to the theater? How does Beckett's
set defy your expectations? What's the purpose, do you think, of his
unconventional approach to setting?

As
precise as Beckett is in his set directions, and as spare as the stage
is obviously supposed to be, there is still plenty of room for
individual directors to interpret the setting in various ways. For
instance, the following two sets are vastly different from the one you
saw in the Beckett on Film production.

Here's a
set which appeared in a 1970 production at the Landestheater in
Salzburg in Austria:

And here theater critic Joanne Klein describes the set used in the
Studio Theater production in Washington, D.C. in 1998:

Russell
Metheny's set design situated Beckett's vagrants in an environment that
announced urban cataclysm ….In the sparsely articulated parking lot of
a long abandoned drive-in movie site, Beckett's blasted tree shared the
stage with a heap of shredded rubber (rubble?)…. Framed against the
backdrop of a slightly askew, artfully corroded drive-in movie screen….

How
important is setting to your understanding of the play? How do you
think the different stages influence how you understand what's
happening in the play?

The
Salzburg set suggests some kind of grand statement, because the setting
seems grand. It's a grand stage all set for a grand tragedy. You might
find the play more than a little ironic in such a setting. The tragedy
may seem more like tragicomedy. Notice the mirror at stage rear-what a
great touch!

The
Washington set brings the setting closer to home and makes it feel more
"realistic." It takes the play out of its surrealistic, dystopian,
dream space and places us somewhere immediately identifiable. Suddenly
we've seen these two tramps before; in fact we see them every day on
East Market in downtown West Chester, by the Salvation Army shelter.

The
"Beckett on Film" set is less grand than the Salzburg stage and less
realistic than the Washington one; instead it opts for the sparseness
of Beckett's script: a country road, a tree. The road and the tree are
surrounded by mounds of rubble on which nothing grows in the first act,
and a little green appears in the second. The set evokes a deadened,
blasted landscape (War torn? Over-plowed? Desert? High altitude?) that
struggles for growth and renewal despite its devastation.

Each of
these sets seeks to amplify some aspect of the play's meaning, or
reinforce its impact. Individual directors can pursue different
interpretations of the play, which leads to each production being
unique in its own right. That is the magic of the theater.

SOUND

In
the film as in the theater there is no musical accompaniment. You might
have noticed that in the film there was no music soundtrack. That
probably seemed very odd to you, even if you didn't think about it
consciously. What was the effect of the lack of a music track?

The
effect most evident is that we hear the silences, which are an
important part of the play's imagery. The characters are always trying
to fill the silence, which seems to represent some kind of intolerable
void. Silence as void, as nothingness, is too disturbing, so they talk
and talk ceaselessly to cover up their awareness of this scary,
soul-crushing silence. There's no music of the spheres to attend to in Waiting
for Godot. But although the characters battle the silence again and
again, Beckett seems intent for us, the audience, to hear it,
experience it, think about it, feel it. The play creates several vivid
images of silence.

Michael
Worton, in "Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theater as
Text" observes the multifaceted silences in Waiting for Godot,
noting the "silences of inadequacy, when characters can't find the
words they need; silences of repression, when they are struck dumb by
the attitude their interlocutor or by their sense that they might be
breaking a social taboo; and the silences of anticipation, when they
await the response of the other which will give them a temporary sense
of existence." In all of these ways, Beckett makes "silence
communicate."

LIGHTING

The one
lighting effect is when day turns rapidly to night and the moon rises.
The surrealistic, dreamlike effect of this heightened change from day
to night amplifies the theme of uncertain time.

ALLUSION

Several
biblical references enter the play, but some of the allusions that are
less obvious are literary ones.

At the
end of ACT I, Gogo's comment about the moon alludes to a Shelley lyric:

"To
the Moon" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I
AND, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The mood arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass.

II
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Shelley's poetry continues to reverberate in ACT II. These allusions
are some of the play's very few external references. Macbeth later
echoes faintly, but distinctly, in Pozzo's speech about the brevity and
apparent meaninglessness of existence; are we suspended for one
flickering instant between the birth canal and the grave? These
references let us know that Gogo really was a poet, that these were
educated men. Here's the relevant passage from Macbeth (V,v:10-30):

MACBETH:
I have almost forgot the taste of fears;
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me.

[Re-enter
SEYTON]

Wherefore
was that cry?

SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

CHARACTER

In the typical drama, the main character or characters undergo some
type of transformation, some significant growth or change. This was a
theme we explored earlier in the semester in Ovid’s tales, in “Axolotl”
and even in the Inferno. However, Beckett’s main characters, Didi
and Gogo (Vladimir and Estragon), remain, annoyingly or amusingly
depending on your sensibility, resolutely static and unchanging. While
they remain static, the minor characters (Pozzo and Lucky) are
dynamically transformed (Pozzo most obviously, Lucky more
subtly). Addressing Pozzo, in recognition of his startling
blindness and deep despair, Didi remarks melodramatically, “How you’ve
changed!” Other changes are evident in the second act, but the more we
notice these the less important they seem. The dead tree has
leaves. It still looks dead. Didi offers Gogo a radish
rather than a carrot. Is it a case of “the more things
“change” the more they stay the same? What happens when that old
cliché is applied to character?

PLOT / CONFLICT

Traditional cause/effect plot development is abandoned in Waiting for
Godot. The movement of the play is circular and
symmetrical. The second act parallels the first. Nothing
new happens except the tree grows leaves, indicating a surrealistic
passage of time. The characters engage in ways that closely
parallel the first act; the key difference seems to be an increased
struggle in the second act to “pass the time,” which passed quickly in
the first act because of Pozzo and Lucky, whose appearance is briefer
in the second act. The dilemma intensifies in the second act
because Gogo is more and more desperate to leave and Didi has to
continually remind him why they mustn’t leave because they’re waiting
for Godot. There is a kind of climactic thematic crescendo in
Pozzo’s parting speech and another in Didi’s brief speech just before
Godot’s messenger arrives for the second time. These brief
speeches don’t necessarily provide much of a climax to the action as
much as they deepen themes already established.

You can see how this play presents us with a non-traditional plot,
although there is a dilemma: the characters want to go but feel “stuck”
waiting for Godot. They want to commit suicide, but have grown
either too apathetic or too helpless to act on their desires.
Habit deadens their own cries as surely as it deadens the cries of
others.

THEME

We can’t fail to miss the theme of uncertainty in Waiting for
Godot. Uncertainty is pervasive throughout the play: the
uncertainty of purpose, of time, place, emotion, relationships, truth,
and hope. Existence is the only certainty the play allows.
The Cartesian dictum that declares with such certainty “I think,
therefore I am,” is challenged, but essentially hold true. Didi
and Gogo are themselves vivid dramatic representations of the
Descartes’ body/mind split. Didi is all mind, Gogo all
body. Thinking and inexhaustible talking may not be the same
thing, but in the absence of the one the other will do.
Throughout the play thinking is associated with doubt, uncertainty,
difficulty, weariness, or absurdity. Clearly, our ability to
think is challenged in this play.

Related to this critique of our rational capabilities is the play’s
critique of language as essentially meaningless, repetitive blather and
chatter on the one hand and oppressive tyranny on the other. At
times it is coercive; other times it’s rhetorically empty, full of hot
air—worse than blather—hypocrisy, or mystification. Only rarely
does it serve us well, leading us to truth or beauty, but we can’t
sustain those functions very well. Pozzo’s poetic description of
the twilight may be true and even beautiful, but it peters out—“And
that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.” Language fails us
just when we most need it. Even when it hits home, our first
impulse is to run away from the “melancholy truth” we’ve somehow
managed to accurately express, a truth no longer unconsciousness but
given the full light of language, as Didi does near the end of the play
when he empathizes with Pozzo’s despair. “What have I said?”
However true, we don’t want to know.

The critique here seems to stem from a deep, postmodern distrust of the
efficacy or absoluteness of language. We place our trust in it,
but should we? Language is the source of all our illusions, the
source of all the mythic fictions we’ve invented to console ourselves
from an awareness of our real condition. These fictions have
blinded us to the reality, the essential truth of our existence.
The only truth is this present moment, which we are free to spend
wisely or waste away, and to waste it away by hoping for some future
“salvation,” by waiting for a Godot that almost certainly will never
come, is tragic and absurd. The misery of the characters as they
wait is palpable. If they weren’t waiting what better thing might
they think to do, might they actually do?

The language of the play is stripped bare, scaled down to its naked
essence. You won’t find a writer more capable than Beckett in
this regard. The beauty of Beckett’s language is in its absolute
economy. It’s a tight little fist that punches hard. The
language of this play forces us to reflect on how we use language,
really—what our talk consists of, in essence. Are we really that
concerned about thinking hard, or using our rationality? To what
use do we actually put this “gift” of language and rationality?

In all of its aspects, including its language, Waiting for Godot
confronts the absurdity of existence and challenges us to figure out
who we are exactly and what we’re doing with our time. In this
random universe, where everyone who lives and who dies, who’s up and
who’s down, is a matter of pure chance, and the odds aren’t necessarily
in our favor, what do we do? What’s our purpose? The
existentialist would say that our purpose is to confront our existence,
our being, to be aware of and a part of every passing moment—to make
choices, to act—to live authentically, in good faith, aware of our
essential freedom and responsibility. This is what Didi can’t or
won’t do, and he persuades Gogo to keep him company while he continues
to wait for Godot, while he pins his hopes on a future that almost
certainly will never arrive. His futile waiting is either absurd
or heroic, depending on your own interpretation.

Beckett was interested, it seems, in the relationship between hope and
despair. Are Didi and Gogo in despair? Or do they have
faith?

There’s quite a lot more we could observe in terms of theme, though
having said so much already, I think meaning in this play is probably
best approached subjectively—the way you individually choose to
understand it. How do you talk about the meaning of a
circle? My observation of the play and everything I’ve read about
it leads me to conclude there is very little objective interpretation
which will make this play mean much more than it means quite obviously
on the surface. Two lowly tramps are waiting for someone they
think will help them, but this person, Godot, never arrives. It
seems reasonable to assume that Godot will never arrive, but Didi and
Gogo go on waiting, perhaps because they hold out hope that he will,
perhaps because they have nothing better to do, perhaps because they
have no choice. Do they have a choice?

There are those who will still be asking, but what is this play really
about? What does it all mean? What does it all have to do
with us? Some audiences see immediately how they, like Gogo and
Didi, are waiting, too. Maybe not for “Godot,” but for
something. A little help, a little push, a little sunshine, a
little windfall. The play takes pains not to be specific, to
provide the space to read into it any way we want to. It does not
preach a “message.” But when you think about it even a
little bit, you realize that, just like Gogo and Didi, we’re waiting
all the time, too. Think about it: aren’t we waiting for the war
in Iraq to end, waiting for the oil to flow, waiting to win the war on
terror? We’re waiting for nicer weather, the end of exams.
Or maybe in the back of our minds we’re waiting for an end to
racism….an end to poverty, drug abuse, domestic violence… Many of us
are waiting for environmental disaster, the next world war, the next
flu pandemic, the next school shooting, the next terror attack… we’re
waiting for security, good times, that great vacation, that better job,
nicer clothes, a better car, a smaller cellphone, a bigger house; we’re
waiting for the perfect soul mate, the perfect body, the perfect
moment… we’re waiting for our hopes to be heard, our prayers to be
answered, our wishes to be granted… we’re waiting, and meanwhile,
we’re….here.

I remember asking this question on the very first day of class one
semester: what are you most looking forward to this term? And
many students answered: summer vacation. Spring break. The
end of the semester. As you can imagine, this amused everyone
every time and in every way it managed to be stated. I’ve always
been pathetically naïve, so that was an answer I hadn’t
expected! On top of that, I’m admittedly an idealist; I like
shiny bright ideas as opposed to bitter realities, but buried beneath
my frequent disappointment with the real world, I’m deep down an
optimist. I had an optimistic illusion that students would be curious
about what the semester would hold, what classes would be like—probably
not our class in particular since it was/is a gen. ed. class, a
requirement and not entirely a free choice—but the semester in
general. I thought that’d be a good first-day ice-breaker
topic. But that illusion was popped right away. The
truth is the truth—idealist or not I prefer it over illusion any day. I
recognized that this was an honest answer, given in an offhand,
lighthearted, friendly way—but all the same I thought about it because
it struck me as somehow terrible. Those students were waiting
for the end of the semester and the semester had only barely
started. If they were already waiting for the end, then it was
almost certain that whatever might happen along the way would be all
but meaningless. They were looking past it. Through
it. Beyond it. What they really would have liked was to be
saved from it, delivered on a magic carpet from January straight to
May. After I gave it some thought I began to realize why that
lighthearted joke made me uneasy: it introduced the possibility that we
were about to enter into an absurd charade, that instead of learning
together we’d be killing time together (like Didi and Gogo in this
play). I can’t explain my feeling otherwise. As lighthearted as
that response was there was also something disturbing about it because,
in its offhand (and rare) truthfulness, it indicated such a profound
disengagement with the moment, such a dispirited boredom (and classes
had barely even started). To arrive at something waiting for it
to end is to forfeit all the possibilities of the present moment, to
hand everything over to pointlessness, absurdity, tragicomedy, as
Waiting for Godot so
poignantly reveals. But life is not art and unlike the play, the
semester did come to an end. Time passed and summer did
arrive to put an end to everyone's waiting. But I'm sure, if you're
reading this, you can imagine that flicker of an instant that brought
the summer to an end, too, and you can probably imagine those same
students coming back to these same classrooms once again. I
suppose they are waiting once again, but I hope not. I would hope
they’d be fully engaged in whatever gift of a moment they find
themselves in, appreciating the present, instead of waiting for some
better end.

Waiting for Godot is a
poignant play about such waiting, about the
repetition, the meaninglessness, the absurdity of waiting, of feeling
(and being) suspended in time instead of moving forward in a meaningful
direction. It’s not necessarily about the absence of God, or about
Christian salvation, or existential despair, or nihilistic
meaninglessness, or postmodern critiques of language, though
interpretation is a subjective enterprise, and we can interpret
literature how we choose. One way of understanding this play is
to see it as an abstract play about waiting, about waiting for the
possibility of a better future that we are not quite fully convinced
will never arrive.

How do we arrive in this seemingly absurd state of waiting?
Laying an existential interpretation atop the play, we might say that
this play confronts an unpleasant truth about the human
condition. As human beings we’re all clinging to the hope of some
kind of salvation, some kind of Godot to come and save us from whatever
intolerable moment we happen to be suffering—our poverty, our disease,
our boredom, our quiet
desperation. This hoping, this waiting, removes us from the
potentially liberating awareness that the moment we’re actually
suspended in, this moment between birth and death that glows so
briefly, is ultimately more important than any vague “better future” we
might desire. This waiting is what prevents our passages, our
meaningful transformations, our growth.

Everything in the play points to suspension: suspension of time,
suspension of progress, suspension of reason, suspension of
purpose. As drama, every convention has been suspended; the
characters and their dialogue dance around in the ether of a nearly
empty stage. There’s no shortage of void, as Didi declares.
It seems the only thing that’s not suspended is our disbelief.
Are these characters supposed to represent us? We resist.
But ultimately Beckett’s art prevails.